Gerrymandering Isn’t What’s Wrong with Our Politics

The most important influence on how members of Congress vote is not their constituents, but their party. This makes them out-of-step not only with the average American — the “broad-based public opinion” that Obama mentioned — but also, and ironically, with even their base. Members are more partisan than even voters in their party.

From my newest post at Wonkblog. The subject is a reoccurring concern about gerrymandering—that it inhibits compromise by putting members in lopsidedly partisan districts. This concern not only exaggerates gerrymandering’s role in reducing the competitiveness of House elections, in fomenting partisan polarization, etc. This concern also conceals what is really a more fundamental problem of representation in our polarized politics. See the post for more, featuring the research of Simon Jackman, Nolan McCarty, Boris Shor, Joseph Bafumi, and Michael Herron.

8 Responses to Gerrymandering Isn’t What’s Wrong with Our Politics

while I agree with you that the evidence for the gerrymandering –> polarization hypothesis is weak, the title of the blogpost – i.e. the claim that Gerrymandering isn’t what’s wrong with our politics is a bit odd, especially as it coincides with Sam Wong’s pretty convincing demonstration of the partisan effect of gerrymandering.
I’d say if one party has a consistent 2-3% advantage in house elections that’d be a pretty big problem.

Another explanation for why we see this sort of behavior can be found in my theory of subconstituency politics (Bishin 2009), where politicians appeal to intense groups of constituents and in doing so build coalitions that (often) fall along traditional party lines depending on the constellation of intense groups in their states and districts

I am not feeling as much conflict among my friends and relatives after the election. I wonder if the media doesn’t have a large responsibility for the political division. I also think the American citizenry is just plain tired of all crap – desensitized.

This post particularly caught my eye because I am doing a research project on gerrymandering and political polarization. While I agree with you that partisan identification has a lot to do with polarization, and that House reps. are arguably more polarized in general than their constituents, I still can’t shake the feeling that gerrymandering doesn’t have something to do with polarization.

Particularly here in PA, the most recent electoral cycle has left us with a group of 18 Reps. 12 Republicans to 6 Democrats. The state itself voted for Obama, 51-52% to Romney’s 49%. I would expect to see a larger number of Democratic reps. The Republicans from these districts essentially have free reign to engage with whatever agenda they wish, as 11/12 of them won with 55% or greater margins. The Democrats’ victories were even more concentrated, with quite a number of 75%+ votes for them. Pretty safe, from my understanding.

I agree that gerrymandering doesn’t cause polarization, but I would wager that certainly enables it. Sorry if I missed a point, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on what the actual cause is. Thanks!

It may be the case that certain gerrymanders don’t do much to mitigate polarization — I say “certain” because not all gerrymanders are partisan — but it’s really a very minor factor at best. You can see the research of Poole, McCarty, and Rosenthal on this. They drew lots of different districts and came away with at best very small decreases in polarization.